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Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French: Review

Peking in January 1937 was a city on the edge. Comprising the northern outpost of a fractured China, it sat squarely in the crosshairs of the Japanese army who were massed in the Japanese-controlled lands to the city’s north.

Peking in January 1937 was a city on the edge. Comprising the northern outpost of a fractured China, it sat squarely in the crosshairs of the Japanese army who were massed in the Japanese-controlled lands to the city’s north.

Accordingly, Peking was awash in the precursors of war: hired thugs roamed the streets, Japanese-supplied opium and heroin assuaged the masses and a protean cast of refugees and migrants continually appeared and disappeared in its maze of hutongs, the narrow alleyways that weaved the city together.

Death was not uncommon in this setting. At daybreak each day, carts roamed the streets to collect corpses that had materialized overnight, the victims of suicide, overdose, starvation or even murder. The victims were uniformly impoverished and mostly drawn from the city’s desperate Chinese population.

On the morning of January 8, 1937, the body of a young, blonde-haired woman was found at the base of a watchtower along the ancient city wall. Her death had obviously been a brutal one: her face was unrecognizable due to trauma, she had been stabbed numerous times and, most gruesome of all, her chest cavity had been pried apart and her heart removed. Even in a city numbed to the shock of death, this murder was unfathomable. It was made even more so by the fact that the victim, Pamela Werner, was the wealthy nineteen-year-old daughter of a former British consul to China.

Despite a fevered investigation and attention from the international press, the case was never solved. War officially descended on Peking in July 1937, and the murder of Pamela Werner was swept aside by history and forgotten.

Until now.

Midnight in Peking, the new book by Shanghai-based analyst-cum-historian Paul French, relies on archival materials to re-launch an investigation into this 75-year-old unsolved murder mystery. With precision and dramatic flair, French paints a convincing case and, with this book, has perhaps finally attained some form of justice for Pamela Werner.

As he describes her, Werner, a student at the Tientsin Grammar School who speaks fluent Mandarin and has spent her entire life in China, is an independent spirit with a bit of a rebellious streak. On the cusp of womanhood, she has a bevy of suitors and a penchant for attention. Her father, E.T.C. Werner, is a widower whose young wife died under mysterious circumstances years before. A prototypical “old China hand,” Werner is a retired diplomat and a scholar whose own independent streak has made him an outcast from the gilded and insular world of Peking’s Legation Quarter, a kind of miniature Europe populated by an elite diaspora and walled off from the rest of Peking like a medieval town.

While the Legation Quarter is awash in relative luxury and even boasts its own police force, the rest of Peking is hardscrabble and chaotic. This is especially true of the Badlands, a no-man’s-land adjacent to the Legation Quarter made up of twisting hutongs and ramshackle dive bars, brothels and nightclubs. White Russians who fled Bolshevik Russia rule the roost here, with madams and prostitutes working alongside burly bouncers and pimps dredged up from the growing lot of castaways who have landed hard in Peking.

The mystery of Pamela Werner’s murder, as portrayed by French, straddles these disparate worlds and reveals that they overlap more than it might appear. Detective Chief Inspector Dennis, an ex-Scotland Yard detective stationed in Tientsin, teams up with Colonel Han, the district police chief, to retrace Pamela’s last days through the streets of the Legation Quarter to the shadowy corners of the Badlands. However, they are continually stymied by a lack of clues, an unclear motive and an ongoing power struggle amongst their superiors meant to avoid losing face at all costs. As a result, their investigation goes nowhere and is discontinued when Peking finally falls to the Japanese.

With the city under siege, only E.T.C. Werner continues the quest for the truth by heading up his own investigation funded by his life savings. Indeed, it is the documentation that resulted from this private investigation, miraculously discovered by French in an uncatalogued file in Britain’s National Archives almost three-quarters of a century later, which spurred French to write Midnight in Peking and unofficially reopen the case.

French writes with a novelist’s eye for detail, sketching a forgotten Peking down to the colour of the lanterns in the hutongs and the types of street snacks on offer at the late-night Badlands cafés. Despite having drawn largely from primary sources, including police records, medical reports, newspaper articles, diplomatic dispatches, interviews and E.T.C. Werner’s own desperate investigation, the book does not read like a dry historical record. It is colourfully plotted and suspenseful as it untangles the story of who killed Pamela Werner, and why.

French uncovers more than a mere murder mystery, however. In his portrayal, the murder of Pamela Werner is at once an omen, a game of diplomacy and a window into the duplicity of human nature. Vice and virtue, we learn, are never mutually exclusive.

Jason Beerman lives and writes in Hong Kong.

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